Improving the technical hiring process

By Harj Taggar on May 7, 2015

Guillaume, Ammon and I are excited to announce the launch of our new company, Triplebyte. Our goal is to build a consistent and data-driven process for hiring programmers.

Most companies make up their hiring process as they go along. We certainly did that when hiring at our own startups. This has problems. Resumes are relied on heavily as the first screen, but many great programmers have really bad resumes. Technical interviews are typically run by an interviewer who is unsure which questions to ask or how to evaluate answers. Final hiring decisions are based on gut feeling, which is rarely (i.e. never) measured for accuracy.

This is a manifesto of how we believe technical hiring should work. We want to build a company that specializes in assessing the ability of engineers without relying on the prestige of their resume credentials. Once we've identified them, we're going to help them find great places to work. We'll use the latter to measure how well we're doing at the former.

We're going to do two things differently. First, track decisions as quantitatively as possible. Second, run experiments with our own process. We expect it to change completely over time. Frankly, we'd love to get rid of interviews entirely.

We're starting our first experiment today - blind phone screens. First, we ask a few questions to verify you're a programmer. It's our version of an online FizzBuzz. Once you pass those, we ask you to schedule a 15-minute technical phone call. We only want to talk about one thing: code you've written in the past. That's literally the only thing we'll ask you about. Our hypothesis is that's enough to help good programmers stand out. After that we'll go deeper into code you've written before over a couple of 45 minute technical interviews via screen share.

Humans are complicated and making decisions about their ability is difficult. We're excited about trying because the potential reward is so large. A better hiring process can significantly reduce bias. It'll open up the opportunity for anyone, from anywhere, to be assessed on their ability. It'll help startups find the programmers they need to build great products. We think this would be a great thing for the world and we're excited to build it!

If you have ideas for other ways we could experiment with our process, or if you think there's a better approach than the one we're taking, we'd love to hear from you. founders@triplebyte.com.

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How to Interview Engineers

By Ammon Bartram on Jun 26, 2017

We do a lot of interviewing at Triplebyte. Indeed, over the last 2 years, I've interviewed just over 900 engineers. Whether this was a good use of my time can be debated! (I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat and doubt it.) But regardless, our goal is to improve how engineers are hired. To that end, we run background-blind interviews, looking at coding skills, not credentials or resumes. After an engineer passes our process, they go straight to the final interview at companies we work with (including Apple, Facebook, Dropbox and Stripe). We interview engineers without knowing their backgrounds, and then get to see how they do across multiple top tech companies. This gives us, I think, some of the best available data on interviewing.

Does it Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?

By Mark Lane on Dec 14, 2016

If you’re a programmer considering a move to the Bay Area, you probably know at least two basic facts: 1) tech salaries are higher here than elsewhere, and 2) living here is really expensive. Both facts have been true for a long time, but they have become especially true in the past four years. Since 2012 home prices have risen by about 60% and rents by about 70% in both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas. The absence of any apparent upper limit to these increases has given rise to a new journalistic subgenre, the Bay Area Housing Horror Story. Maybe you’ve heard about the cheapest house in San Francisco, a $350,000 “decomposing wooden shack” whose interior is “unlivable in its current condition”? Or the tent next to Google X that was renting for $895 a month? Or the guy on Reddit who calculated that it would be cheaper to commute daily to the Bay Area from Las Vegas by plane than to rent an apartment in San Francisco?

Bootcamps vs. College

By Ammon Bartram on May 19, 2016

Programming bootcamps seem to make an impossible claim. Instead of spending four years in university, they say, you can learn how to be a software engineer in a three month program. On the face of it, this sounds more like an ad for Trump University than a plausible educational model.

But this is not what we’ve found at Triplebyte. We do interviews with engineers, and match them with startups where they’ll be a good fit. Companies vary widely in what skills they look for, and by mapping these differences, we’re able to help engineers pass more interviews and find jobs they would not have found on their own. Over the last year, we’ve worked with about 100 bootcamp grads, and many have gone on to get jobs at great companies. We do our interviews blind, without knowing a candidate's background, and we regularly get through an interview and give a candidate very positive scores, only to be surprised at the end when we learn that the candidate has only been programming for 6 months.